Politics, media and general commentary on the news of the day...with the occasional rant.

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Just Say No to Koch in School!

Let’s
just say, for arguments sake, that you are a dyed in the wool Republican.I’m not talking an old school Eisenhower
Republican; I’m talking a true right-wing libertarian, Fox News watching, Glenn Beck loving, free market, trickle down economics
Republican.

And
then, for the fun of it, I told you that the Teamsters and the Service
Employees Union had gotten together and are sponsoring a business class for
high school students, taught by your local high school teacher in your local
high school.And what if that class
focused on the importance of unionization to the economic future of America?

And
for the icing on the cake, at the end of the class, the students got paid with
scholarships etc.

Would
you be comfortable with that?(If you
are such a Republican, I suspect you just popped a nitro tablet to fight off
the angina.)

Well
my hardcore Republican friends don’t worry.It is actually just the opposite of what I described.It is, instead, the very right wing Charles
G. Koch Foundation and they are buying their way into schools to teach the
anti-regulation, free market dogma that mirrors the Tea Party libertarian view
of the world.

“Lesson
plans and class materials obtained by The Huffington Post make the course's
message clear: The minimum wage hurts workers and slows economic growth. Low
taxes and less regulation allow people to prosper. Public assistance harms the
poor. Government, in short, is the enemy of liberty.”

And
this it isn’t just the interpretation of the Huffington Post.Emails obtained from the program’s open
Google group (thanks guys!) make the true intent of the program is clear.

“…the
current structure of the program began to take shape in November 2009,
documents show, when a team of associates at the Charles G. Koch Foundation
launched an important project with Charles Koch's blessing: They would design
and test what they called "a high school free market and liberty-based
course" with support from members of the Koch family's vast nonprofit and
political network. A pilot version of the class would be offered the following spring
to students at the Wichita Collegiate School, an elite private prep school in
Kansas where Koch was a top donor.

"First, the Koch team chose its mascot: a
golden eagle holding a knife in its beak. They also assigned each other
nicknames: Ol' Mucky Terrahawk, Mighty Killer, Big Gay Mule, Midnight Bandit
and the Erratic Assassin. The group dubbed itself the "Wu-Teach
Clan.

"Over the next six months, members of the
Wu-Teach Clan exchanged hundreds of emails with one another and with Koch
lieutenants. They hashed out a strategy to infiltrate public schools after
surveys showed that the wealthy prep school students largely failed to absorb
their libertarian message.

"The emails show that Charles Koch had a
hands-on role in the design of the high school curriculum, directly reviewing
the work of those responsible for setting up the course. The goal, the group
said flatly, was to turn young people
into "liberty-advancing agents" before they went to college, where
they might learn "harmful" liberal ideas.” [HuffPost]

Here are just a few of the “falsehoods” that
the YE group wanted to dispel with students:

·Rich get richer at the expense of
the poor

·FDR/New Deal brought us out of the
depression

·Government wealth transfer programs
help the poor

·Private industry incapable of doing
functions that public sector has always done

·Unions protect the employees

·People with the same job title
should be paid the same amount ...

·Minimum wage, "living
wage," laws are good for people/society

·Capitalist societies provide an
environment for greed and materialism to flourish

Hey, this is a long article and I’m not going
to run through the entire thing.The
bottom line is this.The Koch Foundation
is targeting woefully underfunded school districts that are desperate for any
infusion of cash or free curricula with right wing propaganda designed to shape
the student’s ideology so that it more closely reflects their own. They aren’t
teaching kids to think, they are attempting to indoctrinate them into the
extreme political right-wing.

And it doesn’t have to stop after high
school.

“A student can take the YE course in high
school, participate in the YE Academy to earn scholarship money and then use
that money to pay for a degree from a Koch-funded university. So it isn't just
a relatively small but growing high school program offered in Kansas and
Missouri. It's part of a larger mission.” [HuffPost]

YE isn’t about the students, its mission is
creating a political future that serves to protect the wealth of the elite to
the detriment of the rest of us. It is about securing the future of those with
money and power.It is, simply put,
class warfare designed to ensure that the robber barons of today continue to pillage
the economy of tomorrow.

Full Article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/16/koch-brothers-education_n_5587577.html